JILL PAZ

Jill Paz was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1982, and immigrated to the United States with her family the following year. She studied painting at the Columbus College of Art and Design and attended a studio program at Parsons School of Design in New York before pursuing Art History at the University of British Columbia and then returning to her alma mater for a master’s degree. She had solo exhibitions at Archivo 1984 (Manila, Philippines), ROY G. BIV Gallery (Columbus, Ohio, US), City Center Gallery at The Ohio State University’s Urban Arts Space (Columbus, Ohio, US), Backspace Gallery (Portland, Oregan, US), Rockwell Center (Manila, Philippines) She has been part of group exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Banff Centre in Banff, Canada, the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus and the Mori Museum in Tokyo. She was a visiting artist at Kunsthaus Raskolnikow, Dresden, and Alte Feuerwache Loschwtiz, also in Dresden, Germany. And she conducted residencies at Mildred’s Lane in New York and Banff Centre, Banff.

Through her work, Jill Paz enacts a homecoming. Her work embraces the realms of both the intensely personal and the distant past. Paz revisits and reinterprets the body of works of the late 19th century Filipino painter Félix Resurrección Hidalgo (1855-1913), an enigmatic figure in Philippine art history and her great grand-uncle.

Jill Paz’s works are detailed approximations crafted with photography, painting, computer programs and laser. She uses laser-cutting technology to bore, etch and puncture delicate layers; she programmed the laser-cutter in such a way it can etch a digital image on cardboard. In such a way, she is able to show the transient and vulnerable nature of paintings as objects: to be open to the possibility that the past and its objects can change, disperse or fall apart into total collapse.